Editor’s Note – Refuse

We dedicate this issue to the memory of S. Anitha, who scored 1176 out of 1200 in her Tamil Nadu state boards, was shut out of medical college by NEET regardless, and took her own life nine days after the Supreme Court closed the last door open to her state. 

Dear readers,

Thank you for being here.

This is the fifteenth issue of Usawa Literary Review. Eight years have passed since Lavanya Shanbhogue-Arvind and I published our first issue with little more than conviction, borrowed time and an unreasonable faith in literature as feminist resistance. Since then, Usawa has remained what it set out to be: independent, self-funded and accountable to its readers and contributors.

In these eight years, we have started a sister magazine, Matchbox, dedicated to literary criticism and collaborations; a series on creative writing, Workshops by Usawa; and two podcasts, Usawa Talks and Usawa Study Circle. The paid workshops have not made us sustainable, but they have helped keep the work alive. In an ecosystem where independent literary spaces disappear with alarming regularity, survival itself has become a political act.

But survival alone has never been our dream. Our dream remains to reimagine. That is why Refuse felt like the only possible theme for this issue — one that holds, among much else, a new translation of Faiz’s Intesaab, Katherine Shehadeh’s refusal of the flag, and Chidimma Ewelukwa’s walls that finally refuse to keep a powerful man’s secrets. Women have been both refuse and refused, as have so many marginalised communities. Vermin. Waste. Filth. Cockroaches. Mary Douglas called dirt “matter out of place”; Kristeva called it the abject — what a society expels to know its own edges. Caste had already built a doctrine of purity and pollution on the same logic, long before either of them wrote it down. That is what we have been called, and that is how dignity has been denied. So we dissent. We create. We love.

Before people are denied their rights, they are first denied their humanity. Language performs violence before the law does. This year, a sitting judge called the country’s unemployed youth “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Within days, the insult had been reclaimed as the Cockroach Janta Party — a protest furious, hilarious and irreverent enough to leave behind the sharpest memes of the year. It belongs to a much longer history of public imagination of dissenting students, sportswomen, farmers. 

Even when erased, an act of dissent leaves a palimpsest. Those who come after do not begin from nothing; they write into those faint but indelible traces.

Extraordinary things unfolded quietly. People sent food, medicines, phone chargers for strangers. They built a safe space for women protestors. Daily-wage workers sacrificed income they could not afford to lose, to march beside students they had never met. Countless nameless people endured police brutality in ways that will never be recorded in official histories.

Many who came in solidarity belonged to communities that have long carried the weight of state violence, discrimination and exclusion. Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, queer communities and countless others whose own struggles remain unfinished did not stand apart and say, now you know how we have suffered. They came. They stood shoulder to shoulder with those who were, for perhaps the first time, encountering the machinery of power so directly. This is not solidarity that flattens difference — it is radical love, love that sees difference fully and shows up anyway. It is time for us, the privileged of this country, to reciprocate it.

What this generation has enabled is the reimagination of our country. For once, India does not feel like an abstraction invoked in speeches or campaigns. This protest is India. Ambedkar’s India — not the India of borrowed constitutional language, but the one he warned we would lose without social democracy beneath the political kind.

Every authoritarian project shrinks collective imagination through fear; every act of dissent enlarges it. We refuse to accept fear as the price of citizenship.

Love, 
Smita